Genre and anti-genre, satisfaction and subversion. Why Community is so much fun for me as a geek, why TBBT isn't, and why I'm actually into that, (but you don't have to be.) I'm going to try and defend TBBT too, but defending TBBT turns out to look a lot like trashing TBBT, so something here for everyone.

As much as we love science fiction and fantasy here, we have to admit they have a limited range. Or do they? Mainstream shows don’t have aliens or gnomes, but sometimes they capture the feelings of otherworldliness and outrageousness better than scifi and fantasy. What are your favorite stealth genre shows?

Margaret Atwood insists that her novels aren't science fiction, as everything she writes either has happened or could happen today. But in looking at Atwood's latest novel, The Year of the Flood, science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin disagrees.

Steampunk's Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with its imagined technologies has captured the imagination of designers, hobbyists, and writers. Now a literary publicist hopes to launch the same kind of movement for green technologies.

Astronomer Marcus Chown wonders if science fiction is dying. With technology and scientific discovery advancing so quickly, it's unclear what will become of a genre based largely on predicting the future. Charles Stross has gone so far as to say that it’s no longer possible to write near-future science fiction. Six…

The final frontier of pulp literature is the romance novel, which is also the biggst selling book genre. So it's not surprising that a growing subset of romance novels also feature lovelorn spacemen (and women.) After all, astronauts need loving too. As the handful of romance books featuring spaceship battles and…

Click to viewCall it the year of mindwipe chic. Coming up on TV in midseason, we've got Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse, about "actives" whose personalities are wiped and replaced for each job they do. And in the fall we've got the debut of My Own Worst Enemy, where Christian Slater plays a nice guy who finds out he…

Genre movies are like folk tales: hundreds of people tell the same basic story again and again, with little variations and tweaks. Thus part of the pleasure of watching horror or scifi movies, at least for me, is figuring out which things have been tweaked — and which stories are getting retold. I like to make little…

Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton is set to direct his first science fiction film, Executive Order. It's typical alien-invasion fare, with a plane crash unleashing a space monster that terrorizes a snowbound small town. Still, Singleton's got the violent-action chops to make it work: his remake of Shaft may have…